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New York on Notice in Summer Heat Wave

A brutal heat wave that has temperatures nearing the century mark in the tri-state area has New York City utility officials ready to take action should a massive power outage occur for the second time this summer.

Nearly two weeks ago, hundreds of thousands of Consolidated Edison customers lost power in Manhattan and the Bronx apparently due to a bolt of lightning, though the outage did occur on one of the hottest days of the year.

Ever since a power outage in New York City brought thousands of residents and workers onto the streets in August of 2003, along with a series of power outages left thousands of Queens residents without power during some of the hottest days of last July, residents and Con Ed officials alike have been on edge as summer temperatures climb to dangerous levels.

At times like this, it's important to remember that a cadre of folks in the New York metropolitan area are committed to closing Indian Point Energy Center. I wonder what the situation would look like right now if Indian Point disappeared from the electric grid?

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The following is a guest post from Matt Wald, senior communications advisor at NEI. Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattLWald.

From the batteries in our cell phones to the clothes on our backs, "nanomaterials" that are designed molecule by molecule are working their way into our economy and our lives. Now there’s some promising work on new materials for nuclear reactors.

Reactors are a tough environment. The sub atomic particles that sustain the chain reaction, neutrons, are great for splitting additional uranium atoms, but not all of them hit a uranium atom; some of them end up in various metal components of the reactor. The metal is usually a crystalline structure, meaning it is as orderly as a ladder or a sheet of graph paper, but the neutrons rearrange the atoms, leaving some infinitesimal voids in the structure and some areas of extra density. The components literally grow, getting longer and thicker. The phenomenon is well understood and designers compensate for it with a …

If Isaiah had been a nuclear engineer, he’d have loved this project. And the Trump Administration should too, despite the proposal to eliminate it in the FY 2018 budget.

The project is a massive factory near Aiken, S.C., that will take plutonium from the government’s arsenal and turn it into fuel for civilian power reactors. The plutonium, made by the United States during the Cold War in a competition with the Soviet Union, is now surplus, and the United States and the Russian Federation jointly agreed to reduce their stocks, to reduce the chance of its use in weapons. Over two thousand construction workers, technicians and engineers are at work to enable the transformation.

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The question confronting the state now isn’t what the companies that owned the reactors at the time of de-regulation got or didn’t get. It’s not a question of whether they were profitable in the '80s, '90s and '00s. It’s about now. Business works by looking at the present and making projections about the future.

Is losing the nuclear plants what’s best for the state going forward?

Pennsylvania needs clean air. It needs jobs. And it needs protection against over-reliance on a single fuel source.